STORY: Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Monday, after a jury in California said he waited too long to bring his lawsuit against the AI company.
Stavros Gadinis is a law professor at UC Berkeley:
"The statute of limitations in this case is the general statute of those limitations that California applies, which is three years. And here he had a really kind of difficult task because he had to show, to convince the jury to exercise an equitable power, the power to correct a wrong. And it's very hard to convince the jury to correct this wrong, this mistake. If there is a lot of time that has passed since that mistake was first known and he didn't bring a lawsuit earlier."
The Oakland jury found OpenAI was not liable to the world's richest person for having allegedly strayed from its original mission to benefit humanity.
"Very little about how parties understood OpenAI's mission was actually written down and codified. And I think the biggest takeaway message as far as the governance of AI is that some key expectations ought to have been explicitly expressed. And therefore, and this would have made a ruling much easier, and a claim much easier to bring."
After the unanimous verdict, Musk's lawyer said he reserved the right to appeal but the judge suggested he may have an uphill battle.
The trial had been widely seen as a critical moment, not only for the future of OpenAI, but that of artificial intelligence in general, both how it should be used and who should benefit.
The verdict followed 11 days of testimony and arguments, with each side accusing the other of being more interested in profits than serving the public.
Musk accused OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of wrongfully trying to enrich investors at the expense of the nonprofit arm, while OpenAI countered that it was Musk that saw dollar signs, and that he waited too long to claim it breached its founding agreement to build safe, beneficial AI.
OpenAI competes with artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and Musk's own xAI, and is preparing for a possible initial public offering that could value it at $1 trillion.
Meanwhile xAI is now part of Musk's space and rocket company SpaceX, which is gearing up for an IPO that could be even bigger than OpenAI's.
